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Friday, 11 October 2013

Concours Detailing Day 5 of 5

Wow, what a day! It's been a long one and I got a hell of a lot completed. I'm really happy with the progress made today.
I started the day by firstly taking the day off from work then dropping past the local Mercedes dealership to pick up the touch up paint I ordered on Monday.

I started with the driver side rear door then moved to the rear quarter panel. Here's the progress pics.

Next was the boot/trunk lid. It was looking quite badly scratched with plenty of swirls. I was really hoping I could get some good correction there. Lucky for me, it wasn't too difficult.

When that was complete, I moved on to the wing and the rear end. I taped up all the badges and cleaned up the area behind the number plate too.

Happy with the result, I moved to the hood, the last remaining panel. This was the thorn in my side since there are an incredible amount of water etch markings all over it. I REALLY wanted to correct this as well as possible.
During the correction, I found that the water etching was very bad so I had to do 2 passes with the harder pad/compound combination, then a fine polish.

Again, here are the progress pics. As you can see, the water etching is pretty severe.

Post correction. It's a lot better with minimal damage present.

I made a video of the process of correcting the hood, but since it's a total of 1.2GB to upload to Youtube, I'll post it another time when it's uploaded, processed and I've edited all 4 videos into one.

And lastly, I did a bit of polishing on the front chrome.

So, all in all, it was a great productive day. I managed to finish ALL polishing. Yay me!
What's left is to wash the car to remove all polishing dust and then to prep for the sealant and wax. When that's done, I can move on to the interior while the sealant cures so I can apply a second coat before the day is over.
There's one item which I haven't done yet and won't be done till the time the car has been parked at the Concours event. I'll write about that later.

There were supposed to be 5 days in my preparation for Concours, but since I made an extra visit yesterday (Thursday), tomorrow's entry will be the 6th and final before the event.